Wine and reading group in India

If you are planning an event to celebrate or promote New Writing 12 here is an idea you could think about and adapt to your own situation.

When New Writing 12 was launched in India we created a wine and readings evening. The idea behind it was 'tasting'. New Writing 12 is a taste of contemporary writing in the UK and each piece is a taste of that writer’s work. Tasting is a term often connected with wine, an opportunity to sample a range of different styles or vintages. We thought of connecting the two and found there were many other parallels we could explore. Reading and drinking are very personal things. We can never be sure that someone else is having exactly the same experience. There can be immediate reactions of liking and disliking but when we try to talk about these with other people we need to develop a language that articulates our reasons for this.

A more useful approach than leaping to like and dislike is to track our experience. Do we choose a bottle of wine by the label, a book by its cover? In wine tasting the nose is as important as the mouth. When we try to describe smell we have to resort to simile and analogy – it’s like new mown grass; it reminds me of a wine I had on holiday. Those comparisons can trigger similar responses in other people or lead them to suggest different examples from their own experience.  And so the dialogue begins…

Bhadra Patel

Sometimes we start a book and find it hard to put it down while on other occasions we struggle to get past the first chapter. Our mood, where we are and the things that are going on in our life at that moment are all factors in how we engage with the writing. It’s the same with wine. 

The most important parallel we explored was the pleasure and privilege of having lots of different styles to choose from. Light and dark, smooth and rough, sharp and sweet. The words could be applied to different writing as much as to wine. New Writing 12 is a great opportunity to explore voices and forms that we don’t normally read.

Nick Barlay during a reading in India

We chose four wines, all different in character, and matched them with pieces in New Writing 12 that had parallel characteristics.  Each wine was introduced and the audience invited to look at the wine, smell it and then taste it.  People discussed the wine with the people next to them. The two pieces of writing were introduced and the extracts were read while people continued to savour the wine.   

In India we were fortunate to have Nick Barlay present to read his own pieces in New Writing 12.  That was a great bonus but it is possible to have a successful event without any of the authors.

If you don’t feel confident to introduce the wines yourself enlist the help of a local wine merchant or wine waiter.

If you don’t think that wine tasting will work in your situation you could think of other parallels such as food and books.

The audience in India really enjoyed the event – 'brilliant' was the reaction from many people.  Factors that contributed to the success were:

• Planning – make sure you are clear about what you want to do; identify who will do what
• Programme – keep it varied and don’t make it too long (in India the event lasted one hour)
• Introduction – explain to the audience at the beginning how the event will work, what they can expect, what they are expected to do at each stage
• Readers – it is good to have a range of different voices reading the pieces. Make sure that the readers are comfortable with the piece you have asked them to read.
• Space – create a special atmosphere if you can. In India we used a cabaret style seating arrangement and dressed the tables to combine a relaxed atmosphere with a formal setting.